Well given how much crap Facebook has gotten today (for obvious reasons), maybe THEY should practice digital social distancing! I mean… DUH!!!
Hey everyone! For my second trick (er… review), I decided to take a look at an acclaimed film that is reaching it’s tenth anniversary later this year and just arrived on Netflix recently in the form of The Social Network. Now for those who didn’t read my first review on Onward, first off WHAT THE HECK ARE YOU WAITING FOR?!?! (Ok, don’t yell at the reader. Just breathe, “The sun’s getting real low”) …alright, apologies for that. As I was saying, for this blog I have decided to exne’ a plot summary so I can get right into the actual review (tell you what, here’s a link for the IMDb page for it in case you don’t know what this movie’s about… even if it should be pretty obvious: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1285016/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0)
Anyway, it’s time to get on with it! Yeah, as a young and budding cinephile, I have heard about this movie for years now as an all-time cinematic classic. And now that I have finally seen it, I can thankfully say that I concur with that notion (look at the doctor’s language on this guy!) as I found The Social Network to be an amazing film.
Funny side-tangent (though it’s kinda not a tangent, but I’m getting into the semantics of some semantics), when I first started watching it, I was only 30-ish minutes into it when I had to stop to do other things. But when I came back to it later that night, I actually decided to watch it in from the beginning because what I was seeing so-far was excellent and yeah, it was worth it.
What made it especially more… worth it (phrasing is weird sometimes), was how I was able to pinpoint even more nuances to Aaron Sorkin’s phenomenal screenplay. It goes without saying that Sorkin has one of the most infectious screen-writing styles I have ever seen as his dialogue is nothing short of engrossing and the same goes for how well he writes just about any scene. Sorkin creates this unique sense of progression that feels layered with such vivid detail, all running to the frenetic pace that becomes so infectious that it practically becomes the driving force of the entire film (and with a perfect run-time of 2 hours on the dot to boot, it really couldn’t feel like a more fulfilling film).
Fortunately, the sound structure of every bone in The Social Network‘s body does not come close to making the overall story suffer in the slightest (let’s just say that this movie didn’t just not skip “cinematic leg day”: it didn’t skip ANY day at all… did I just make a reference to working out? Gross). The way that Sorkin used the framing device of the lawsuits came across brilliantly on-screen as they paint the story of Facebook’s creation with so many subtleties and thematic depth at such a high level of quality.
Of course, it goes without saying that Sorkin wasn’t the only genius storyteller on-board, since you also had the crisp direction from David Fincher (that kept it grounded in reality and heightened to the cinematic screen really well); the smooth editing from Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall (who made the potentially tricky structure flow like Niagra Falls); Jeff Cronenworth’s eye-catching cinematography (that came across as poignant without grabbing the hammer labeled “Arty fartsy” and hitting the viewer smack in the face); and DEFINITELY the score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (which empowers every moment with a unique and memorable flare). And oh yeah, the performances from both Jesse Eisenburg and Andrew Garfield are stellar as they go deep into their characters to create an unbelievably real and complex portrayal of Facebook’s co-founders.
Really, there is only one tiny little flaw that I could point out here (Gasp! Even amazing movies can have problems, what has my life become?!?!). You can definitely tell that Mark Zuckerberg goes through an arc by the end- but the movie tries to focus on a lot of things here and thus, it feels like even just a tad bit more time spent on Zuckerberg’s arc could have made his growth feel even more earned. With that out of the way, The Social Network is still an amazing film and there is absolutely, positutely (did I seriously just say that? UGH!) no reality where my reaction to this film is any less than “WOW!!!”
Rating: 9.5/10 and I loved it!
Well, with that praising out of the way, thank you so much for reading this post! (I’m definitely happy to see that people liked my last review and I hope the same goes for here) If you have seen The Social Network or now have thoughts of watching it with it’s recent arrival on Netflix, let me know about it in the comments. And hey, at this point I think you should all know who I am…
I’m Your Friendly Neighborhood Film Nerd!!! (… now let’s just hope that I didn’t become a massive target on Facebook’s s@#$ list 😉 )
Spinning the Cineweb 